Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology © 2014 American Psychological Association
2014, Vol. 20, No. 2, 187–190 1078-1919/14/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/pac0000019
A Sociocultural Approach to Peace and Conflict
Brady Wagoner
Aalborg University, Denmark
Conflict is ubiquitous in the social world
from the level of interpersonal relations to na-
tions. This could not be otherwise given that there are
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differently positioned actors, each with their own
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interests, history, and perspective on the world.
In times of peace, these conflicts are managed
such that escalation does not occur. But under
certain conditions, equilibrium can be broken,
leading to prolonged violence, instability, and
in extreme cases war and genocide. These dy-
namics can be seen in the wake of the Arab
Spring. For example, since the 2011 revolution
in Egypt, the country has experienced intensi-
fied conflicts between Muslims and Christians,
secular and religious believers, the security
forces and the Muslim Brotherhood, and so
forth. To make sense of these conflicts, we must
explore the unique social and historically situ-
ated perspectives of these different social
groups and how they guide the action of their
members toward others. This is one of the basic
starting places of sociocultural psychology,
which informs my own perspective on peace
and conflict.
BRADY WAGONER is Professor MSO and Director of the
MA program in Cultural Psychology and Social Practice at
Aalborg University. He received his PhD from the Univer-
sity of Cambridge, where he was co-creator of the Sir
Frederic Bartlett Archive and journal Psychology & Soci-
ety. He is also associate editor for Culture & Psychology
and Peace & Conflict, and on the editorial board of eight
other journals. His books include Symbolic Transformation:
The mind in movement through culture and society (Rout-
ledge, 2010), Dialogicality in Focus: Challenges to theory,
method and application (Nova, 2011), Culture and Social
Change: Transforming society with the power of ideas (Info
Age, 2012), Development as a Social Process: Contribu-
tions of Gerard Duveen (Routledge, 2013), and Cultural
Psychology and Its Future: Complementarity in a New Key
(InfoAge, 2014). He is currently working on a book titled
Bartlett in Reconstruction: Where Culture and Mind Meet
(Cambridge).
CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be
addressed to Brady Wagoner, Department of Communica-
tion and Psychology, Aalborg University, Kroghstræde 3,
Aalborg Ø, 9220, DK. E-mail: wagoner@hum.aau.dk
187
Sociocultural psychology aims to understand
the mutual constitution of persons and social-
cultural worlds (Shweder, 1991). In this ap-
proach, we must attend to the way persons and
groups use culture to create meaning to guide
their action and communicate with others; it is
through this process of use that culture is trans-
formed (Valsiner, 2014). A related assumption
is that we cannot adequately understand social
and psychological processes in separation from
history, social practices, other people, and cul-
tural artifacts, nor should we assume these de-
termine people’s behavior. These factors partic-
ipate in and are constitutive of our acting,
perceiving, imagining, thinking, and remember-
ing (Wagoner, 2010).
I have very intentionally used the gerund of
these psychological categories to emphasize
that our interest is in dynamic and transforma-
tive processes, rather than abstract, universal
and de-contextualized entities that are often pre-
sumed to exist in individual minds and explain
their behavior (cf. “the embryonic fallacy”—
Moghaddam, 2010). The entity approach tends
to naturalize psychological processes (e.g., rape
has been explained as an expression of an adap-
tive evolutionary mechanism—Dupré, 2003),
rather than exploring the systemic conditions
under which they might be changed (see
Reicher & Haslam, 2012)— dramatic conflict is
only inevitable under particular social condi-
tions. This has also been a point of criticism by
Serge Moscovici (2000), who has called for a
societal psychology focusing on issues of social
change and minority influence.
This perspective has informed “the cyclical
model of social change” that I have been devel-
oping with sociologist Eric Jensen (Jensen &
Wagoner, 2009, 2012). The focus of the model
is on the transformation of ideas, their imple-
mentation in practice, and the conflicts that oc-
cur in this process. It begins with a distinction
put forward by Rom Harré (1998) that society is
organized and maintained through both ideals
and practices. Ideals refer to norms held at the
 188 WAGONER
level of discourse while practices refer to the
enactment of norms in concrete behavior. The
former are open to discussion while the latter
may be done without reflexive awareness. Thus,
the discrepancy between what people say and
what people do is expected to occur from the
outset.
The analytic focus on change leads us to
consider transformations taking place within
and between ideals and practices. We highlight
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four aspects of social change, each of which has
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its own forms of conflict attached to it. First,
communication involves intellectual, rhetorical,
and discursive struggles over ideas as has hap-
pened with civil rights, woman’s suffrage, and
the green movement. Mass media as well as
other communication channels (e.g., art) play an
important role here. The outcome of the strug-
gle is that some ideas become ascendant
through effective framing and use of available
media. Conflict happens here at the level of
words and how behaviors are framed (e.g.,
whether something is considered a right or a
sin). In Egypt, the state’s monopoly on the
media has helped those in power to effectively
justify authoritarian measures against dissident.
Second, implementation describes the mobi-
lization of professionals to create practices that
align with the ascendant ideas. Conflict often
arises here when the professional field is not
structured in such a way as to reward imple-
mentation of an idea into practice (cf. Bourdieu,
1977). For instance, Castro and Bastos (2008)
showed how experts (e.g., architects and con-
tractors) discursively accepted the new norm of
public participation in neighborhood develop-
ment while rejecting its implementation in the
specific case they were active in. Conversely,
during times of war, someone in a chain of
command might act contrary to an instruction
given from above, even if this impedes their
career advancement or has more serious conse-
quences. Milgram’s (1974) classic explanation
of obedience as entering an “agentic state” be-
comes untenable from this perspective because
what is really at stake is the negotiation of
different meanings guiding action.
Third, public engagement highlights where
ideas come into contact with publics. Conflict
can arise in situations where affected publics
have different interests and habits, or the appeal
of the idea is insufficient to garner support
among them. Interventions must take place di-
rectly into the concrete social practices with an
informed understanding of the public’s preex-
isting framework. Some new laws turn out to be
so unpopular that they have to be repealed. For
example, prohibition in the United States did
not curb alcohol consumption but simply
shifted the profits to criminal organizations.
Furthermore, as we know from the history of
postapartheid in South Africa and postslavery in
the United States, practices of discrimination
can continue to exist long after laws have
changed.
Fourth, deliberation points to a return to
communication for renewed debate, new ideas
or the termination of the previous idea. In this
renewed reform, contradictions inherent in an
idea or practice are recognized and alternatives
are put forward. An important concept in rela-
tion to this is the “public sphere” (Habermas,
1989) through which organized citizens can
limit and hold powerful actors accountable. The
dramatic protest seen in the wake of the finan-
cial crisis and the Arab Spring are clear exam-
ples of publics challenging those who hold the
positions of power in society. Particularly in
Egypt, over the last two years, “the street” has
been an extremely effective stage to communi-
cate popular discontent; it is thus little wonder
that the current regime has set up restrictive
laws to prohibit any such expression.
Another issue of importance operating in all
four aspects is collective memory (Wagoner, in
press; Wagoner & Gillespie, 2013). To commu-
nicate we must share a background of assump-
tions about the world, which are implicitly car-
ried forward from the past in present
discussions. Moreover, new ideas are rhetori-
cally successful when they are positively an-
chored to the old. Memory can also operate on
the level of habits accumulated through experi-
ence (cf. Bourdieu, 1977), which can create
social inertia for both professionals and publics.
Connerton (1989) has argued that the most suc-
cessful way of retaining social stability through
time is through bodily habits and rituals. During
the French Revolution, rituals (such as the ex-
ecution of the King) and new clothing (that
eliminated status hierarchies) were invented to
overcome existing bodily practices by replacing
them with others that aligned with the revolu-
tionary ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality.
Finally, deliberation relies on the effective use
of the past to make ones point. The January 25,
 A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH
2011, Egyptian Revolution, for example, was
staged on “police day” to draw a stark contrast
between the heroic police of the past (who
fought against a British invasion) and today’s
brutal and corrupt police force.
I am currently planning a large research proj-
ect on collective remembering and diffusion of
the Egyptian Revolution. The focus is on un-
derstanding the social-psychological processes
by which controversial events are reconstructed
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and used by members of different groups and in
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different countries around the world. The way
groups remember their past has direct implica-
tions for how their members act in the present
and move toward the future. The past becomes
a tool for creating change or stability as well as
promoting or inhibiting conflict. Social groups
keep alive memories of “how we were shamed
and dishonoured by them,” “how they have dis-
respected our values and traditions,” and “how
we have been for democracy and they for dic-
tatorship.” These kinds of statements help to
define a group’s identity and goal-orientation
vis-à-vis other groups (cf. Halbwachs, 1992).
Obviously, different groups select different
events and elaborate on them in incompatible
ways in narrating their group’s history.
The produced narrative in turn can become a
particularly powerful cultural tool for guiding
action of members of a group (Wertsch, 2002).
These entrenched historical narratives become
an integral part of current conflicts, particularly
those going on in the Middle East. Thus, the
research project on the Egyptian Revolution
will begin with an analysis of different groups’
narratives of the past, analyzing the events in-
cluded, the main actors, what rights and duties
are ascribed to them, and how they deal with
other groups’ narratives. Furthermore, narra-
tives of recent history point back to a much
longer past. For example, the Muslim Brother-
hood highlights the Egyptian military’s history
of brutal suppression of the group, while the
military highlights the Brotherhood’s history of
terrorist acts. The ultimate aim of the project is
to discover ways of managing these narratives
as cultural tools through a reflection on their
consumption and production, thereby promot-
ing a democratic citizenship and inhibiting es-
calation of conflict into violence.
This project, however, goes beyond the bor-
ders of Egypt to consider how people other
countries relate to the revolution through their
189
own social representations (Moscovici, 2000) of
the Middle East, Islam, democracy, dictator-
ship, revolution, and so forth. News of the
Egyptian Revolution has spread around the
world, inspiring in different countries hope and
fear, protest, and policy. Parallels have been
made with the revolutions of 1848 and 1968. In
Spain, for example, people have talked about
the “Spanish Revolution,” and protesters have
renamed a square in Barcelona “Tahrir.” Under-
standing the social-psychological processes by
which popular uprisings spread is of ever-
greater importance in a world that is increas-
ingly globalized and interconnected (cf. Wag-
oner, 2014). Conflicts are now global affairs and
need to be studied as such.
To summarize, my approach involves under-
standing peace and conflict as situated cultural
processes influenced by both local and global
factors. We must attend to the systemic social
conditions under which conflicts escalate into
violence. I also highlight how social change
takes place through both ideas and practices,
and how it is rooted in the collective remem-
bering of groups. Within this perspective, cul-
ture is not something groups belong to, but
rather something they use to navigate their
world; it is a tool that guides action. Increas-
ingly, people as well as cultural tools are trav-
eling around the world. Psychology can no lon-
ger be blind to the central role culture plays in
our increasingly interconnected lives where we
must interact with people from vastly different
cultural backgrounds and are exposed to ideol-
ogies and events from the other end of the
world. Conflicts can be managed by engaging
with people within their own perspectives on
the world, encouraging them to reflect on the
ideas that guide their action.
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